So doing some work lately on Ephemera- that’s the iPad app that consolidates local museum media on a Google Maps interface, so you can get a timeline view of your city.

What have I done?

– Created the timeline! Now you can scroll over time and view all of the media.

– Click over to the detail view of the pinpoint on the map- we didn’t have time to get that going before. It’s basically making a link in the annotation. The hard part, that kept hitching me up, is that the button has to either be the simple style, or the completely configured one, incuding image, which I didn’t have.

– Web data transfer, from a hosted Rails site. I setup the site on here, banane.com, and now my admin can curate the collection. When you launch your iPad app, it goes out and gets the new data on the server. This is a pretty rough cut and there’s some vital features missing… but it’s a frame upon which to build, so to speak.

Funny, getting the Rails server up took about 10 minutes. The NSXMLParser, to interpret the XML request, a few hours. That’ll get faster, but still.

More on Ephemera: Ephemera, the iPad App